The Kids Can't Read
Don't take my word for it, ask Osama Bin Laden
Kids Today
For those not actively involved in education- as either parents or teachers- the methodology of reading education may seem totally insipid. We don’t care how children are taught to read so long as they are taught. But it turns out that years of faulty teaching practices, pushed by political ideologues, have made our children stupid- and that’s just where they want them.
The kids are not okay. That is the messaging that we’ve been receiving from some of the most astute social scientists and commentators since the millennial generation- my generation- began to enter the workforce in the early 2000s. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, published a book in 2006 titled ‘Generation Me’ and her findings are best summarised by the book’s subtitle ‘Why today's young Americans are more confident, assertive, entitled--and more miserable than ever before.’
Other popular works followed with Gen Z (those born after 1996) as the subject matter. Jonathan Haidt’s Coddling of the American Mind (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff in 2018) and Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids (Second Edition- 2021) lay out the data which show a decline in youth mental health, a loss of meaning and purpose, and a move towards illiberal safteyism. Many good theories are proposed that account for these negative generational changes- most notably the online lives of today’s youth and the commensurate decline of unsupervised, free play. But there’s a piece of the puzzle that is often left out of these conversations- the decline of reading.
Start ‘Em Young
Back in 2019, I began teaching at a private high school. The students there are considered to be of a high calibre and academically inclined. I used to ask every new class of students how many of them had read a book in the past year. It was never more than 4 or 5 kids in a class of 30. And for the longest time I thought that it was best explained by some of the phenomena described by Haidt, Twenge and Skenazy. Students were living their lives online. Focus had dropped and books were not nearly stimulating enough to hold their attention from beginning to end. And that was certainly a piece of the puzzle. But then I started to notice other things. When I would cold-call a student to read an excerpt, the reading was so poor it felt like I was pulling teeth. It was truly painful to listen to. About halfway through the semester, I began receiving long-form assessment tasks and when they were handwritten, the spelling was also so poor that I had to stop correcting mistakes. I realised that many of my students were reading and writing at around a 4th grade level (I taught 9th, 10th and 11th grade).
(Photo Credit: monkeybusinessimages via iStock)
How did this happen? I decided to review some of the teaching materials from our primary school. It turns out that primary school teachers have been teaching reading all wrong in service of some romantic notion of childhood competency. They have been taught, erroneously, that children are ‘natural’ learners, ‘naturally’ competent and that you need merely guide them along (and must never explicitly or didactically instruct).
The Reading Wars
Perhaps one of the greatest educational battles that has stemmed from this ideology in the past century has been the so-called reading war. In the 20th Century, the West achieved unprecedented levels of literacy, a feat that was aided by compulsory K-12 schooling. And yet, in 2023 a CBS report noted that "Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University's community college system."
What could account for the sudden literacy deficit in an age that has seen such remarkable advances in educational access? According to David C. Banks, the New York City Schools' Chancellor, it all comes down to reading instruction. Tried and tested for centuries, reading instruction had focused on phonics- sounding out words until they form familiar patterns that have meaning. This enables a person to become a life-long reader- constantly capable of learning and pronouncing new words.
The 20th Century progressive educationalists, however, sought to import reading methods from languages such as Chinese and Japanese. Since these languages do not have alphabets but rather, ideographs, reading is taught by learning to recognize 'entire words'. Words are, in a sense, viewed as pictures. The argument was that by learning to memorise whole words by their shape and appearance, children would acquire a working knowledge of reading at a much quicker pace and at an earlier age. For an alphabetic language like English, this, of course, does not work. Students are severely limited by the number of words they can physically recognize and they have no tools to break down new and unfamiliar words. This makes it nearly impossible to graduate to long form styles of writing which require constantly interacting with new vocabulary. But of course it sounds nice. It’s romantic to bash traditional rote learning as robotic and soul-crushing for the developing child. But romance has no place in an age of data.
Study after study has shown that whole-word reading produces comparatively poor results with phonetic reading. This theory was already put to the test in the 1960s by Dr. Jeanne Chall, the head of the Harvard Reading Laboratory. In 1967 she published years of research in the book Learning to Read: The Great Debate. She concluded that explicit phonics instruction was superior to the whole language approach in producing proficient readers.
Despite the utter failure of whole-language reading, it has persisted in schools across the Western world. Some of its biggest champions are authors of whole-language curricula and have become like rockstars in certain educational circles. Gay Su Pinnell speaks at conferences and education schools across the world, raking in millions and cruising around in a Maserati. So much for the humble profession that many of us got in to in order to nurture the next generation.
But the crookedness of educational charlatans should not be of particular concern to the average parent, teacher or student. They need to worry about the functional illiteracy of Gen Z and try to work out how to fix it.
Going forward, it’s clear that teachers need to reverse course and go back to good old phonics. This is the approach that is being adopted in New York City public schools and the New South Wales education system in Australia. All of this is a welcome development (or rather, realignment), but millions of Western kids right now cannot read, and it shows.
Reading and the Knowledge Deficit
The skills of reading go beyond the realm of pronunciation and even comprehension. Effective readers don’t just understand what they’re reading, they can assess it and make value judgements on it. And I’m convinced that the lack of reading skills is to blame for what was one of the most positively crazy stories of the year- the viral uplifting of Osama Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ by Gen Zers on Tik Tok.
Many commentators have seen this as an example of how anti-American sentiment has become rampant amongst Gen Z. Others pointed out that those promoting it wanted to simply create viral content and bring attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Respectfully, I do not see either of those as a satisfying explanation. The reason the content was promoted was because Gen Z cannot read. If they could, and if their attention span was greater than that of a goldfish, they would have also read Bin Laden’s tirade against “acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling and trading with interest.”
The inability to read here extends beyond the mere words. It speaks to a broader issue- a knowledge deficit (a term coined by the great educator E.D Hirsch). If young people don’t know who Osama Bin Laden was, what Al Qaida stood for or how many people were killed on September 11, of course they won’t approach his letter with the requisite skepticism.
A return to phonetic reading may help Generation Alpha (those born after 2010), but Gen Z are entering the workforce now. They are voting now. And they are wholly unequipped to do so. If employers and indeed, countries, hope to be populated by knowledgable, literate individuals, reading needs to once again become a requirement. If companies can establish DEI teams (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and require employees to work through ‘anti-racism’ modules (which have been shown to actually increase racism in some instances), they can require you to read an article a week about an industry related topic. Only when we as a society start demanding literacy, will Gen Z be forced to step up to the plate and right the educational wrong perpetrated against them. Until then, I’ll wait for the next terrorist manifesto to drop.